This article lacks the depth of the nicely done article in the Armata Tank vs the M-1 Abrams Tank and the TOW missile. A few points:
F-15C Eagle is now nearly 40 years old.
It may be in service for another 20 years.
The Flanker-E clearly has the advantage at low speeds.
The F-15C and F-15E have the advantage at long ranges.
I gather the author considers them overall roughly equal.
But the lines that catch my attention are:
“More likely to happen is that a F-15 would run into a Su-35 operated by some Third World despot. The pilots are not likely to have the training, tactics or experience to fight against an American aviator with a realistic chance of winning.”
I am not sure which “Third World despots” he is considering for his analysis. Indonesia is a democracy. Indonesia is not on bad terms with the U.S. I gather only Russia has the SU-35 with China and Indonesia having ordered them. Indonesia is using them to replace their aging fleet of U.S. F-5E Tiger IIs. The initial buy is something like 8 planes. Perhaps Algeria, Egypt, India, Pakistan, or Vietnam may purchase them at some point, but these are also not countries we are likely to conflict with. It does not appear that places like North Korea, Venezuela, and what remains of the government of Syria is going to obtain them (although Russia deployed at least 4 Su-35s in Syria). I think the author of the article probably needs to re-examine who is actually going to have and use these aircraft. So far, it seems to be only Russia, China (24 of them) and Indonesia (8 of them).
The line that caught my attention: “Still, Iraq’s military is thousands of soldiers short of the estimated 30,000 troops needed to launch the assault, and the existing forces are stretched thin trying to hold other recaptured territory, particularly in western Anbar province.”
A2/AD stands for anti-access/aerial denial. There is a recently published article from The National Interest that laid out a potential scenario concerning such an effort in the Baltic Sea. It is only 4-pages and makes for a good read: Entering the Bear’s Lair: Russia’s A2/D2 Bubble in the Baltic Sea
There are a number of NATO members on the Baltic Sea: Denmark, Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Non-NATO members are Sweden, Finland and Russia.
Kaliningrad is part of Russia. It is the old German city of Konigsberg and surrounding former Prussian territory. It was given to the Soviet Union at the end of World War II and they attached it to Russian SFSR (which became the independent country of Russia in 1991). The Kaliningrad Oblast had a population of 941,873 in 2010. It is named after the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, Mikhail Kalinin (1975-1946), one of the original Bolsheviks.
This keys off of the previous post by Shawn about the “Third Offset Strategy,” of which A2/AD is a part of.
Image by Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA).
In several recent posts, I have alluded to something called the Third Offset Strategy without going into any detail as to what it is. Fortunately for us all, Timothy A. Walton, a Fellow in the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, wrote an excellent summary and primer on what it as all about in the current edition of Joint Forces Quarterly.
The Defense Strategic Guidance (DSG) articulated 10 missions the [U.S.] joint force must accomplish in the future. These missions include the ability to:
– deter and defeat aggression
– project power despite antiaccess/area-denial (A2/AD) challenges
– operate effectively in cyberspace and space.
The follow-on 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review confirmed the importance of these missions and called for the joint force to “project power and win decisively” in spite of “increasingly sophisticated adversaries who could employ advanced warfighting capabilities.”
In these documents, U.S. policy-makers identified that the primary strategic challenge to securing the goals is that “capable adversaries are adopting potent A2/AD strategies that are challenging U.S. ability to ensure operational access.” These adversaries include China, Russia, and Iran.
The Third Offset Strategy was devised to address this primary strategic challenge.
In November 2014, then–Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel announced a new Defense Innovation Initiative, which included the Third Offset Strategy. The initiative seeks to maintain U.S. military superiority over capable adversaries through the development of novel capabilities and concepts. Secretary Hagel modeled his approach on the First Offset Strategy of the 1950s, in which President Dwight D. Eisenhower countered the Soviet Union’s conventional numerical superiority through the buildup of America’s nuclear deterrent, and on the Second Offset Strategy of the 1970s, in which Secretary of Defense Harold Brown shepherded the development of precision-guided munitions, stealth, and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) systems to counter the numerical superiority and improving technical capability of Warsaw Pact forces along the Central Front in Europe.
Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter has built on Hagel’s vision of the Third Offset Strategy, and the proposed fiscal year 2017 budget is the first major public manifestation of the strategy: approximately $3.6 billion in research and development funding dedicated to Third Offset Strategy pursuits. As explained by Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work, the budget seeks to conduct numerous small bets on advanced capability research and demonstrations, and to work with Congress and the Services to craft new operational concepts so that the next administration can determine “what are the key bets we’re going to make.”
As Walton puts it, “the next Secretary of Defense will have the opportunity to make those big bets.” The keys to making the correct bets will be selecting the most appropriate scenarios to plan around, accurately assessing the performance of the U.S. joint force that will be programmed and budgeted for, and identifying the right priorities for new investment.
It is in this context that Walton recommended reviving campaign-level combat modeling at the Defense Department level, as part an overall reform of analytical processes informing force planning decisions.
Walton concludes by identifying the major obstacles in carrying out the Third Offset Strategy, some of which will be institutional and political in nature. However, he quickly passes over what might perhaps be the biggest problem with the Third Offset strategy, which is that it might be based on the wrong premises.
Lastly, the next Secretary of Defense will face numerous other, important defense challenges that will threaten to engross his or her attention, ranging from leading U.S. forces in Afghanistan, to countering Chinese, Russian, and Islamic State aggression, to reforming Goldwater-Nichols, military compensation, and base structure.
The ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq show no sign of abating anytime soon, yet they constitute “lesser includeds” in the Third Offset Strategy. Are we sure enough to bet that the A2/AD threat is the most important strategic challenge the U.S. will face in the near future?
Walton’s piece is worth reading and thinking about.
Airmen of the New York Air National Guard’s 152nd Air Operations Group man their stations during Virtual Flag, a computer wargame held Feb. 18-26 from Hancock Field Air National Guard Base. The computer hookup allowed the air war planners of the 152nd to interact with other Air Force units around the country and in Europe. U.S. Air National Guard photo by Master Sgt. Eric Miller
In 2011, the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s (OSD) Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation (CAPE) disbanded its campaign-level modeling capabilities and reduced its role in the Department of Defense’s strategic analysis activity (SSA) process. CAPE, which was originally created in 1961 as the Office of Systems Analysis, “reports directly to the Secretary and Deputy Secretary of Defense, providing independent analytic advice on all aspects of the defense program, including alternative weapon systems and force structures, the development and evaluation of defense program alternatives, and the cost-effectiveness of defense systems.”
According to RAND’s Paul K. Davis, CAPE’s decision was controversial within DOD, and due in no small part to general dissatisfaction with the overall quality of strategic analysis supporting decision-making.
CAPE’s decision reflected a conclusion, accepted by the Secretary of Defense and some other senior leaders, that the SSA process had not helped decisionmakers confront their most-difficult problems. The activity had previously been criticized for having been mired in traditional analysis of kinetic wars rather than counterterrorism, intervention, and other “soft” problems. The actual criticism was broader: Critics found SSA’s traditional analysis to be slow, manpower-intensive, opaque, difficult to explain because of its dependence on complex models, inflexible, and weak in dealing with uncertainty. They also concluded that SSA’s campaign-analysis focus was distracting from more-pressing issues requiring mission-level analysis (e.g., how to defeat or avoid integrated air defenses, how to defend aircraft carriers, and how to secure nuclear weapons in a chaotic situation).
CAPE took the criticism to heart.
CAPE felt that the focus on analytic baselines was reducing its ability to provide independent analysis to the secretary. The campaign-modeling activity was disbanded, and CAPE stopped developing the corresponding detailed analytic baselines that illustrated, in detail, how forces could be employed to execute a defense-planning scenario that represented strategy.
However, CAPE’s solution to the problem may have created another. “During the secretary’s reviews for fiscal years 2012 and 2014, CAPE instead used extrapolated versions of combatant commander plans as a starting point for evaluating strategy and programs.”
As Davis, related, there were many who disagreed with CAPE’s decision at the time because of the service-independent perspective it provided.
Some senior officials believed from personal experience that SSA had been very useful for behind-the-scenes infrastructure (e.g., a source of expertise and analytic capability) and essential for supporting DoD’s strategic planning (i.e., in assessing the executability of force-sizing strategy). These officials saw the loss of joint campaign-analysis capability as hindering the ability and willingness of the services to work jointly. The officials also disagreed with using combatant commander plans instead of scenarios as starting points for review of midterm programs, because such plans are too strongly tied to present-day thinking. (Emphasis added)
Five years later, as DOD gears up to implement the new Third Offset Strategy, it appears that the changes implemented in SSA in 2011 have not necessarily improved the quality of strategic analysis. DOD’s lack of an independent joint, campaign-level modeling capability is apparently hampering the ability of senior decision-makers to critically evaluate analysis provided to them by the services and combatant commanders.
In the current edition of Joint Forces Quarterly, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s military and security studies journal, Timothy A. Walton, a Fellow in the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, recommended that in support of “the Third Offset Strategy, the next Secretary of Defense should reform analytical processes informing force planning decisions.” He pointed suggested that “Efforts to shape assumptions in unrealistic or imprudent ways that favor outcomes for particular Services should be repudiated.”
As part of the reforms, Walton made a strong and detailed case for reinstating CAPE’s campaign-level combat modeling.
In terms of assessments, the Secretary of Defense should direct the Director of Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation to reinstate the ability to conduct OSD campaign-level modeling, which was eliminated in 2011. Campaign-level modeling consists of the use of large-scale computer simulations to examine the performance of a full fielded military in planning scenarios. It takes the results of focused DOD wargaming activities, as well as inputs from more detailed tactical modeling, to better represent the effects of large-scale forces on a battlefield. Campaign-level modeling is essential in developing insights on the performance of the entire joint force and in revealing key dynamic relationships and interdependencies. These insights are instrumental in properly analyzing complex factors necessary to judge the adequacy of the joint force to meet capacity requirements, such as the two-war construct, and to make sensible, informed trades between solutions. Campaign-level modeling is essential to the force planning process, and although the Services have their own campaign-level modeling capabilities, OSD should once more be able to conduct its own analysis to provide objective, transparent assessments to senior decisionmakers. (Emphasis added)
So, it appears that DOD can’t quit combat modeling. But that raises the question, if CAPE does resume such activities, will it pick up where it left off in 2011 or do it differently? I will explore that in a future post.
Forbes articles tend to be pretty negative on Russia, but it is no secret that Russia had moved into Ukraine its troops, or its contractors, or Russian volunteers (a word that has had interesting connotations in Soviet history).
A few points:
According to one source, 167 regular troops killed, 187 MIA (missing in action), with 305 mercenaries killed and 796 MIA. Most MIA are likely KIA. So maybe 1,455 Russians killed in fighting in Ukraine. I gather this is a pretty reliable listing of people.
Society of Russian Mothers (this organization has been around for a while) says up to 3,500 KIA.
Malaysian airlines flight MH17 was shot down by a BUK missile system operated by a Russian crew (is there really any other reasonable interpretation of this event?).
4,300 medals awarded “For Distinction in Combat” between 11 July 2014 and February 2016, over 10,000 medals for bravery awarded.
If there are five troops per every one that receives a medal, then one could guesstimate 50,000 Russian troops having served in Ukraine between July 2014 and February 2016.
Anyhow, I have not checked all the various estimates on Russian intervention in Ukraine, and compared and contrasted them, so no sense of how accurate this is. I do note that this is 1,455 killed out of 50,000 involved or almost 3%. This is pretty high. When you add in wounded then you are looking an overall casualty figure that may be as high as 10,000. Of course, the “tooth-to-tail” ratio is very skewed, as most of the support troops would be just across the border in Russia. Anyone have better estimates?
“Bring out your dead!” Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)
As I mentioned recently, the U.S. Army is in the process of deciding whether or not to proceed with the XM-25 Counter Defilade Target Engagement System, a precision targeted, shoulder-fired 25mm grenade launcher. The Defense Department’s Inspector General’s office released a pointedly critical evaluation of the weapon nicknamed “the Punisher” in August. Among the negative reviews the report cited was one from the Army Capabilities and Integration Center, directed by Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster. McMaster’s office has had a change of heart about the XM-25 since that evaluation, however.
“My initial assessment from 2013 did not reflect 30 additional months of testing and improvements to the XM25 Counter Defilade Target Engagement System,” McMaster told Military.com in an email.
“The Army has worked closely with the system’s prime contractor to address the safety issues on the XM25 through engineering design changes and improvements to the system. Prototypes employed during two Forward Operational Assessments allowed the Army to learn from and correct system shortcomings, and feedback has been positive.”
The XM25 is not a simple grenade launcher, McMaster maintains. The sight has an integrated day/thermal sight, a laser range finder, and a ballistic computer working in unison to allow the shooter to effectively engage enemy targets under cover.
The weapon is semi-automatic with a five-round magazine that ensures effective fires and rapid re-engagement, as necessary, in all operational environments — jungle, urban, day/night, woodland, subterranean and desert, McMaster said.
“Worldwide urbanization, coupled with the extensive proliferation of rocket propelled grenades and machine guns, allowed our enemies to exploit our desire to end engagements with minimal collateral damage,” McMaster said.
“The XM25 provides an innovative capability that mitigates this vulnerability and minimizes operational risks facing our soldiers, limiting collateral damage in the surrounding area while allowing our dismounted squads to decisively end firefights.”
The Army has indicated that it will make a determination on the XM-25’s future by the end of September.
War by Numbers is available in the UK for pre-order through Casemate: War by Numbers
I gather this is where the European customers can order the book. There is some restrictions as to who can sell where.
Interesting marketing blurb. Parts were pulled from the intro to my book and parts from the conclusions. Still no book cover picture, although I have seen a draft. Has a tank on the cover (tanks always sell).
